jfarlow
3 days ago
This is a challenge, even for someone who has professionally used the breadth of proteins. I really like the test. I'm actually kind of surprised at my own pulling on knowledge to make a guess - it's an orthogonal way to think about the question than is usually posed.
I wonder if there's a way to ease the difficulty by filling in 'correct' features of the guesses: if your guess is a 'transmembrane' then it reveals that as a property. On the other hand, I don't think the annotations are clean enough - and are often designed for 'at all' rather than 'primary' features. For one of the examples, once I noticed it was an adhesion protein, it would have been interesting to sift through classes or cell types as opposed to just continuing to shoot in the dark based on the structure alone.
I presume you're showing even the 'low confidence' portions of the predicted structure? Please do.
You could also show the primary amino acid sequence too - there's a weird familiarity with those given how often the structures themselves have historically not been so accessible. BLASTING each of the guesses would be another interesting thing to see.
brinedew
3 days ago
I'm glad you enjoyed it.
> I wonder if there's a way to ease the difficulty by filling in 'correct' features of the guesses
Rather than allowing players to guess individual features, I opted for the "highlight" system where all hidden features that match your guessed protein's features get auto-revealed. This way, if you suspect a transmembrane protein, you can just guess a known transmembrane protein and see which features auto-reveal.
> it would have been interesting to sift through classes or cell types
You're welcome to suggest databases with good coverage over the proteome that I could use for these.
> I presume you're showing even the 'low confidence' portions of the predicted structure?
Yes, any residues in the files I fetch get rendered. I rank by coverage before fetching.
> You could also show the primary amino acid sequence too
I'll consider it.